Unique detective experience
LA Noire is an open world detective game with its own unique feature that makes it stand out from the rest.
You play as Cole Phelps, a detective in 1947's Los Angeles. You start as a lowly beat cop and slowly move up to the upper tiers of the detectives as you solve cases and progress the overarching story. There is a persistence element as well, your badge will rank up during the normal course of game-play. When you rank up you can earn intuition points, new outfits, and locations for collectible vehicles. Intuition points are important, they act as a lifeline of sorts but you can only have a few saved up at once. I will discuss their purpose in greater detail in the next section. Suits and cars are just cosmetic collectibles that don't alter the game-play in any way.
While working a case you will be doing one of three things; looking for clues, questioning witnesses, and shooting/chasing criminals.
Clues are the backbone of your investigation into a case. Without disabling anything, when you are near a possible clue a tone will play, and the background music will stop when you have found all of the important clues. This makes missing clues extremely difficult. Its important to note that you can increase this difficulty by switching off the tone and background music. Collecting every clue is extremely important, a single missed clue can cause the entire case to go in the wrong direction, or even cause you to hit a roadblock. You can use intuition points to make this process easier, but seems unnecessary because of the ease by default.
Questioning witnesses is what makes this game unique, and what makes it a buy for any detective game fan or anyone looking for a unique experience. When you sit down with a witness you choose from a list of subjects based on how well you have handled the case so far, proper handling can break open the case while improper handling can dig you into a deep hole due to the loss of information. Paying extreme attention to the responses is important, you need analyze the tone of voice and the face of the person as they are saying it. This is where the depth comes in, LA Noire used a unique motion capture system that produced the most realistic facial animations to date. This coupled with incredible acting creates a very realistic experience that is both challenging and incredibly satisfying. After you have heard the response, you must choose to either believe what he/she said, doubt it, or use previously collected clues to prove it is a lie. You can use intuition points to either eliminate one choice, or to do a polling system that will give you odds for each choice. The correct choice can lead to more information about your case, or nothing at all. A wrong choice can have either short or long term consequences in the form of missed information.
The last portion of the game is the chasing and gun-play. Both are nothing special, you will get into car chases and your partner will occasionally shoot out of the passenger side window to cripple cars but it boils down to the same thing. Transportation to and from areas can be accomplished by driving yourself or telling your partner to do it as quick-travel. You will occasionally get into foot chases that are predictable and you can never quite catch up to someone you are chasing. Gun-play is passable at well, but very simple with a rudimentary cover system it is mostly used to arrive at a climax for a case. Hand-to-hand combat is restricted to a one-on-one face-off based on a simple punch, dodge, and grapple system that is not difficult but can get frustrating.
The game is set in an open world, but there isn't much to do. It mostly serves as transportation from point A to B with some dialogue in the mix. You can visit most locations after a case if you want to, but there isn't much of a point. Exploration boils down to discovering some unknown locations on your map or finding collectible cars. If you decide to drive for yourself you will have the opportunity to participate in some cookie-cutter side missions that serve nothing other than to increase your badge rank.
At the end of a case you are given a star ranking of your performance based on how many clues you have collected, how many dialogue choices you got right, and how well you drove.
Overall, the game-play is OK but is lifted up by the excellent cast, voice, and facial acting that make the game a unique buy and a great storytelling experience.
